It's not the end of the world: Public key cryptography has been around for only a few decades. Before then (even after the invention of the somewhat impractical one-time pad) the winner (cryptographer or cryptanalyst) was determined by who had more computing power and the more ingenuous ideas.
Basic statistics were death to the ROT13 and the Caesar shift, digital computers were death to Enigma, and now quantum computing will be death to assymetric keys that depend on non-polynomial prime factorization. We'll come up with something else.
It's still scary, however: In practice, the "something else" can take years or decades to invent, and in that time computers can't be networked securely without symmetric keys, and people can't talk without meeting in person first. Particularly worrisome is that this shifts the power toward those with vast material resources: Governments can securely transport planeloads of one-time pads and build great quantum computing arrays, while a few dissenting college students in Beijing or Teheran (or even Washington) would be left with no way to organize.
Swarm networks and steganography will grow vastly more important. Already, it is far harder to hide that you use encryption than to encrypt. Hiding information in plain sight, and relying on anonymous/decentralized distribution, may become the resource underdogs' weapons of choice.
"...that yin-yang dualism can be overcome. With sufficient enlightenment we can give substance to any distinction: mind without body, north without south, pleasure without pain. Remember, enlightenment is a function of willpower, not of physical strength."
-- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter
Hooray, they are only 17% likely to get a false negative on a sick person, and something less than 83% (82%? 50%?) likely to get a false positive on someone healthy.
Combining that with the statistical problem of detecting a rare disease, that's not really useful as the number of true positives vanishes against that of false positives. (Even assuming their results aren't down to a correlation like smoking.)
Pigeon connection is just as one-way as air-dropped dispatches. It just goes the opposite way.
You can't train a pigeon to seek out a location other than its home. The troops in the field had to carry a supply of pigeons with them and send them back to the base - but the base couldn't send a pigeon into the field.
"We admit that it is impossible to come up with any real number for the imaginary theft that has been committed here, so we just make one up to make an example of her and scare off the others."
People who speak their mind too freely should take note: Recklessly causing a riot is a crime. Even if no riots actually occur, the court will soon find you guilty of the murder of an estimated number of people who might have been killed if you had caused a riot with your seditious speech - and execute you to teach the other protesters not to fuck around.
I opened that article knowing what had happened: Some arrogant assholes wreaking havoc with social engineering.
Quickly after this, the text (loaded with references to nasty brown-skinned terrorists and evil computer nerds) had almost managed to make me sympathize with them. Wow, you loitered outside the guy's apartment until he called the police on you. That'll make you look like the good guys.
Forgive my non-lawyer ignorance, but can you actually forbid someone from suing you? As a retroactive clause in a contract, even?
"By downloading this pirated video off BitTorrent, you have implicitly agreed to forfeit any and all options of initiating a lawsuit for copyright infringement."
"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. There is an idea: The idea that open-source is free for the taking for any company that wishes to steal it and has deep enough pockets for litigating."
Peer-to-peer networks have a multitude of applications, few of which run counter to security.
File-sharing, by definition, involves uploading files from your own computer to a network that distributes them uncontrollably.
The government is usually dumb about technology, but apart from the p2p/file-sharing distinction it makes perfect sense that they don't want this on a computer containing sensitive data. Companies tend to outlaw it as well. These are places that prohibit you from carrying portable memory in or out; they don't want file-sharing on there either, just like you wouldn't run Windows, IE or Outlook on them.
(Err... okay, they probably do. But every little bit helps, and if they throw out LimeWire, it's at least a first step toward security.)
For example, the XHTML crowd had pretty much the "Purist" view (throw out everything, start out new) while the "Pragmatists" won out with HTML5 (which adds features on top of HTML4). I pretty much hate that, myself (because HTML4 sucks), but I can appreciate that browser vendors don't all want to have to change their rendering engines.
Google logs search queries by its users. Necessarily, this means it knows very personal things about its users, starting with their sexual preferences (pornography is allegedly the most-searched content), and not ending with their political views.
Now you can search out-of-print books, and suddenly this becomes an issue?
I just don't really see the distinction here. I can appreciate their perspective, but why now, and why this?
World of Warcraft addiction is now no longer treated with shock therapy. More severe cases of internet abuse, such as an addiction to writing overly uppity blog entries, on the other hand...
Yeah - and letters are far easier to generate than inkblots, even. One doctor I went to here in Germany had a beamer-projected, randomized chart. The others all had dozens of slides to pick from.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the end of the world: Public key cryptography has been around for only a few decades. Before then (even after the invention of the somewhat impractical one-time pad) the winner (cryptographer or cryptanalyst) was determined by who had more computing power and the more ingenuous ideas.
Basic statistics were death to the ROT13 and the Caesar shift, digital computers were death to Enigma, and now quantum computing will be death to assymetric keys that depend on non-polynomial prime factorization. We'll come up with something else.
It's still scary, however: In practice, the "something else" can take years or decades to invent, and in that time computers can't be networked securely without symmetric keys, and people can't talk without meeting in person first. Particularly worrisome is that this shifts the power toward those with vast material resources: Governments can securely transport planeloads of one-time pads and build great quantum computing arrays, while a few dissenting college students in Beijing or Teheran (or even Washington) would be left with no way to organize.
Swarm networks and steganography will grow vastly more important. Already, it is far harder to hide that you use encryption than to encrypt. Hiding information in plain sight, and relying on anonymous/decentralized distribution, may become the resource underdogs' weapons of choice.
"...that yin-yang dualism can be overcome. With sufficient enlightenment we can give substance to any distinction: mind without body, north without south, pleasure without pain. Remember, enlightenment is a function of willpower, not of physical strength."
-- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter
So, can haz magtube now plz?
Clearly, NASA employs a Department of ACRONYMS:
Artfully Coded & Readable Operative Names, Yielding Mnemonic Sentences.
Hooray, they are only 17% likely to get a false negative on a sick person, and something less than 83% (82%? 50%?) likely to get a false positive on someone healthy.
Combining that with the statistical problem of detecting a rare disease, that's not really useful as the number of true positives vanishes against that of false positives. (Even assuming their results aren't down to a correlation like smoking.)
Or to have an immune system that can detect and flush out badly replicating cells, really.
At an optimistic guess, we're probably about 10-15 years away from being able to do that with genetics or nanotechnology. Maybe 20-30.
Pigeon connection is just as one-way as air-dropped dispatches. It just goes the opposite way.
You can't train a pigeon to seek out a location other than its home. The troops in the field had to carry a supply of pigeons with them and send them back to the base - but the base couldn't send a pigeon into the field.
I'd be happier if they vowed to enforce the principles, rather than their violation.
I hope that is the error, not the accuracy. :P
For a self-built clock, losing 1.728 seconds a day isn't too bad. But it's not that great either...
Arr, ye lost me at "too much grog", matey.
Shouldn't that be POSTGRESQL, WINDOWS, MAC and LINUX? :P
"We admit that it is impossible to come up with any real number for the imaginary theft that has been committed here, so we just make one up to make an example of her and scare off the others."
People who speak their mind too freely should take note: Recklessly causing a riot is a crime. Even if no riots actually occur, the court will soon find you guilty of the murder of an estimated number of people who might have been killed if you had caused a riot with your seditious speech - and execute you to teach the other protesters not to fuck around.
I opened that article knowing what had happened: Some arrogant assholes wreaking havoc with social engineering.
Quickly after this, the text (loaded with references to nasty brown-skinned terrorists and evil computer nerds) had almost managed to make me sympathize with them. Wow, you loitered outside the guy's apartment until he called the police on you. That'll make you look like the good guys.
Forgive my non-lawyer ignorance, but can you actually forbid someone from suing you? As a retroactive clause in a contract, even?
"By downloading this pirated video off BitTorrent, you have implicitly agreed to forfeit any and all options of initiating a lawsuit for copyright infringement."
Wonder if that would work.
Hint: Probably not. :P
A red-flag is probably if they tell you all of their code is a "trade secret".
vs.
Meh, pretty paltry for a villain.
Doesn't shout, I don't think he's ever cackled... does he even own a cat?
"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. There is an idea: The idea that open-source is free for the taking for any company that wishes to steal it and has deep enough pockets for litigating."
It's gavel-proof.
Peer-to-peer networks have a multitude of applications, few of which run counter to security.
File-sharing, by definition, involves uploading files from your own computer to a network that distributes them uncontrollably.
The government is usually dumb about technology, but apart from the p2p/file-sharing distinction it makes perfect sense that they don't want this on a computer containing sensitive data. Companies tend to outlaw it as well. These are places that prohibit you from carrying portable memory in or out; they don't want file-sharing on there either, just like you wouldn't run Windows, IE or Outlook on them.
(Err... okay, they probably do. But every little bit helps, and if they throw out LimeWire, it's at least a first step toward security.)
In a few years, Ballmer will say that "you'll remember Windows 7 with fondness when Windows 8 comes out".
They make it worse every time. :P
Not just in license issues; in standards too.
For example, the XHTML crowd had pretty much the "Purist" view (throw out everything, start out new) while the "Pragmatists" won out with HTML5 (which adds features on top of HTML4). I pretty much hate that, myself (because HTML4 sucks), but I can appreciate that browser vendors don't all want to have to change their rendering engines.
Google logs search queries by its users. Necessarily, this means it knows very personal things about its users, starting with their sexual preferences (pornography is allegedly the most-searched content), and not ending with their political views.
Now you can search out-of-print books, and suddenly this becomes an issue?
I just don't really see the distinction here. I can appreciate their perspective, but why now, and why this?
"I want the free publicity I get from having my images freely distributable, but I want to retain the sole right to distribute it."
Not how it works.
The real reason for that is that here in tiny Europe, it is impossible to live more than a few miles apart. Didn't you watch Eurotrip? :)
World of Warcraft addiction is now no longer treated with shock therapy. More severe cases of internet abuse, such as an addiction to writing overly uppity blog entries, on the other hand...
So it's like when someone has ingrown toenails, but at least he's finally bought himself some spiffy new shoes.
Yeah - and letters are far easier to generate than inkblots, even. One doctor I went to here in Germany had a beamer-projected, randomized chart. The others all had dozens of slides to pick from.